Sorry to be a little late to the party. Site here.
Banned Books Week
1 Reply
Author Archives: Michael Happy
Quote of the Day: “Oceans have long memories”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SoBF4vFArg&feature=related
BBC report on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet
This week’s Rolling Stone has a devastating article on the almost unbelievable rate of melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Here’s a particularly hair raising excerpt:
In the past few years, scientists have begun to worry that the world’s glaciers have entered what they call a “runaway feedback mode,” in which the dramatic changes to the water and wind and ice caused by global warming have not only accelerated but have themselves begun to alter the climate, creating a dynamic that could be irreversible. Both Antarctica and Greenland are now losing ice at twice the rate they were in 2002 — as much as 400 billion tons each year. In July, after the planet’s six warmest months on record, a giant crack opened up overnight in the Jakobshavn Glacier; for the first time ever, scientists monitoring satellite data were able to observe in real time as an iceberg covering 2.7 square miles broke off and floated into the sea. Three weeks later, an even larger iceberg — four times the size of Manhattan — cleaved away from another glacier to the north of Jakobshavn, stunning scientists who study the ice sheets. “What is going on in the Arctic now,” says Richard Alley, the geoscientist at Penn State, “is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done.”
Scientists say that oceans have long memories. The water reflects the slow-spreading response to events that took place a month, a year, a hundred years ago. An earthquake in the Arctic. A cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. A particularly strong El Niño summer, a decade and a half in the past. These memories are not all known, and their physics are not perfectly mapped, so the movements of the oceans are not well understood. “The ice sheet,” Bindschadler says, “really is just the tail of the dog.” There remains the chance that cutting carbon emissions might, in the long term, prevent more warm water from getting into the Amundsen Sea, where it is melting the ice shelves. If the atmospheric system really does have dials, in other words, then perhaps they can be turned to more comfortable settings. “That may be the saving grace,” Bindschadler says. But even if we reduce emissions, he warns, there is no way to get the heat that is already in the ocean, melting the ice, back out.
This Week in Climate Change Denial: 2010 Arctic Ice Update
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGVgrRAyQmw
Toronto
Richmond Street Methodist Church, Toronto, 1867
On this date in 1867 Toronto became the capital of Ontario.
I haven’t found the source yet, but I know for sure Frye once dryly observed of “Toronto the Good” during the 1930s: “A good place to mind your own damn business.”
On the other hand, Toronto at its best seems, for Frye, to be a touchstone for the cosmopolitan society Canada appears determined to become. From “Canadian Culture Today”:
When I first came to Toronto, in 1929, it was a homogeneous Scotch-Irish town, dominated by the Orange Order, and greatly derided by the rest of Canada for its smugness, its snobbery, and its sterility. The public food in restaurants and hotels was of very indifferent quality, as it is in all right-thinking Anglo-Saxon communities. After the war, Toronto took in immigrants to the extent of nearly a quarter of its population, and large Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Central European, West Indian communities grew up within it. The public food improved dramatically. More important, these communities all seemed to find their own place in the larger community with a minimum of violence and tension, preserving in their own cultures and yet taking part in the total one. It has seemed to me that this very relaxed absorption of minorities, where there is no concerted effort at a “melting pot,” has something to do with what the Queen symbolizes, the separation of the head of state from the head of government. Because Canada was founded by two peoples, nobody could ever know what a hundred per cent Canadian was, and hence the decentralizing rhythm that is so essential to culture had room to expand. (CW 12, 518)
Happy Birthday, Stacey
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGj77BrEgj4
Jewel, “You Were Meant For Me”
I won’t do this often, but my friend Stacey has a birthday today, and these are a couple of artists whose songs were important to her during her formative years. As she’s got great taste, you’ll likely enjoy them too.
Alanis Morissette after the jump.
William Empson
Today is William Empson‘s birthday (1906-1984).
Frye in one of his notebooks on romance:
Empson’s book on ambiguity suggests, though it doesn’t explore the implications of the suggestion, that the difference between a positive & a negative idea often disappears in poetry: his example is “Drink to me only,’ which contains both the expressed postive & the logical negative of the same idea. This is connected with something I read in Vendryes’ book on language, though I noticed it myself. If in poetry you say it’s a hot day because no cool breezes [are] blowing you summon up the image of cool breezes rather than heat. “Sinless” tends to convey the idea of sin rather than innocence (wonder why there are so many “-less” words in Kubla Khan). On the other hand you can use this trick to suggest what you wish were there, & dodge overemphasis on heroic moods by descibing things negatively, as Chaucer does with the funeral of Arcite [in The Knight’s Tale]. I thought that all imaginative traditions begin by overcoming the split in the world of subject & object: the Lankavatara Sutra suggests that the real split is between being and not-being, close to Blake’s vision-analogy business, or rather Generation-Ulro, than the cloven fiction proper. Thus it speaks of those who assert that the bull has horns because they are attached to the notion that the hare has no horns–a profound and witty remark. Hence this question of positive-negative simultaneity may apply Blake’s doctrine of art to a profounder cleavage in experience that he applies it to.
Frye on Islam and the Koran
A page from the Koran, ca. 800
Further to an earlier post, Bob Denham has compiled a collection of quotes on Islam and the Koran which can be found in the Denham Library here.
Below is a selection on Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
[69] In my R.K. [Religious Knowledge] course is a clever & plausible remark about the Koran: suras arranged in order of length only means that if the Koran is the Word of God, God doesn’t give a damn about narrative sequence. Hence the rise of narrative literature and of causality structures (science) in the Christian culture founded on the Bible. There may be still something in this; but it may be balls too. After sura 1, an obvious opening invocation, sura 2 outlines the same old fall-exodus recapitulation, sura 3 adds Xy [Christianity] to it; sura 4 deals with points of law like Leviticus, and so on. It’s just possible that the length-order is the right one, moving from a sort of East Coker laying down of the law, in roughly continuous prose, toward a shower of lyrical apocalyptic sparks, charms, riddles, curses, etc. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Bible, CW 13, 85)
[310] Sex books in a bookshop are not there to tell you anything you don’t know; they’re there to keep your mind on the subject. Similarly with devotional literature, Christian & Marxist. Myths of concern [?]-clouds. This is an extension of the dissociation-by-repetition principle (95–6 on the Koran [par. 294]) that repetition charges the emotional batteries & suspends the critical faculties. What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three hundred times is profoundly true. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Bible, CW 13, 198)
[349] Just as in the Bible we cannot distinguish the voice of God from the voice of the Deteronomic redactor, so in the Koran we cannot distinguish the voice of the angel Gabriel from the voice of Mohammed in a bad temper. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Bible, CW 13, 205)
[353] Resurrection, the opposite of rebirth, is the genuine form of reincarnation. In accepting incarnation Xy establishes the pattern of resurrection which (for instance) Islam doesn’t have. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Bible, CW 13, 206)
[22] Xy absorbed so much that Judaism (like Islam later) excluded. The internalized imagery of the ancient cave returned in the cathedral, whereas the Holy of Holies remained dark: the Mother returned in far greater force, along with the dying god: the totemic identification of human & animal victim is kept separate in the Akeda [binding of Isaac] and Passover: the blood sacrifice is similarly absorbed into the harvest-vintage ones. In short, there’s a real catholicity that gives it the resources of a world religion. It has the power to transcend itself: Judaism hasn’t. More accurately, and gratefully, it did transcend itself in the Christian Word & Spirit (NOT the Church). (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Bible, CW 13, 370)
So the narrative unity of the Bible, which is there in spite of the miscellaneous nature of its content, was something that I stressed. And that concern for narrative seems to me to be distinctive of the Bible among other sacred books. In the Koran, for example, the revelations of Mohammed were gathered up after his death and arranged in order of length, which suggests that revelation in the Koran pays no attention to narrative continuity—that’s not what it is interested in. But the fact that the Bible is interested in it seems to be significant for the study of literature and for many other reasons. (“Symbolism of the Bible,” Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Bible, CW 13, 418)
The New Testament was written in Greek by writers whose native language probably was not Greek. The kind of Greek they wrote was called koine, the popular Greek which was distributed all through the Near Eastern countries as a kind of common language. The writers of the New Testament may have been familiar to differing degrees with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, but when they quoted from the Old Testament they tended to use the Septuagint. And that is the beginning of a principle which is rather important for the history of Christianity. In any sacred book, there is enough concentration in the writing, and enough attention paid to it by those who accept it as sacred, for the linguistic characteristics of the original language to be of great importance. Any Jewish interpretation or commentary on the Hebrew Old Testament inevitably takes great care to study the linguistic nuances of the Hebrew original, and similarly with the Koran, which is so bound up with the linguistic characteristics of Arabic that in practice the Arabic language has had to go everywhere that the Islamic religion has gone. (“Symbolism of the Bible,” Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Bible, CW 13, 419)
The Exodus gives to the Biblical religions that curiously revolutionary quality which Judaism and Christianity and Islam all have to some degree: and we saw that a nation which has gone through that kind of revolutionary experience becomes a nation with a very strong sense of its own corporate unity because of the experience which its people have shared. Thus, law becomes really the antitype of the birth of Israel at the deliverance from Egypt, or the reality to which it points. (“Symbolism of the Bible,” Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Bible, CW 13, 584–5)
T.S. Eliot
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqK5zQlCDQ
Eliot reading “The Burial of the Dead” from The Waste Land
Today is T.S. Eliot‘s birthday (1888-1965). Eliot, besides being one of the primary poets of the age, was also the dominant literary critic in English when Frye was a young man, and had a unique position in Frye’s life and career. While Frye always admired the poetry, he regarded Eliot’s “reactionary” book After Strange Gods as a “betrayal” which made him aware of his “own responsibilities as a critic” (Northrop Frye in Conversation, 107).
Here’s Frye in his 1963 book, T.S. Eliot, on the poet’s anti-progressive view of history and his anti-Romantic view of literature:
The progressive view of history produced the post-Romantic conception of English literature which Eliot challenged. According to this, originality in poetry is an aspect of individual freedom in life; hence Shakespeare, who drew individuals so well, and Milton, a Protestant revolutionary, express the real genius of English literature. The era from Dryden to Johnson was an inferior and prosier age, but the Romantic movement re-established the main tradition, which continued in Britain through Tennyson and Swinburne, and in America through Whitman’s conception of poetry as self-expression.
Eliot’s historical view of English literature is a point-for-point reversal of the progressive one. The post-Romantic conception of “personality,” failing to distinguish the craftsman from the ordinary personality, assumes that the former is the medium or vehicle of the latter, instead of the other way around. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Eliot speaks of the poetic process as “impersonal,” not an expression of personality but an “escape” from it. The poet’s mind is a place where something happens to words, like a catalyser which accompanies but does not manipulate a chemical action. In other early essays, though Eliot agrees with Arnold about the immaturity of the Romantic poets, he means by “Romanticism” chiefly the popular post-Romantic residue of their influence which is contemporary with himself. This Romanticism, he says, “leads his disciples only back upon themselves.” Romanticism, then, as a creative process emanating from and returning from the ego, occupies the foreground of Eliot’s historical dialectic, the contemporary world at the bottom of the Western mountain, as far as we can get from the “anti-romantic,” “practical sense of realities” in Dante’s Vita nuova. (CW 29, 191)
William Faulkner
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxM0C7zjoAc
Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech. (Transcript here.)
Today is William Faulkner‘s birthday (1897-1962).
Frye in “Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism”:
[B]ecause literature is born of a specific culture and a specific locale, most great literature is intensely localized. I know of no great literature written about an empire, with the very dubious exception of Virgil’s Aeneid. William Faulkner, for example, is a great writer today not because he is a citizen of a great power or speaks one of the world’s major languages (although those factors are undoubtedly important for his reputation), but because he deals with a provincial and decaying civilization in Mississippi which most even of his fellow Americans know very little about. The writer has two centres of gravity: one in his own time and audience; the other in our time and in us. It is a mysterious but primary fact of literature that a poet remote from us in space and time and culture can still communicate his central vision to us, though we may admire him for reasons quite unintelligible to him or his age. Literature survives only by virtue of what is communicable across these barriers of culture. (CW 10, 250)
Levant and Libel
Libel suits are nothing new to Ezra Levant, who’s racked up a remarkable number of them in the last decade.
He’s currently shilling for a new book about the Alberta tar sands called (no joke) Ethical Oil, despite that fact that Alberta’s bitumen is the single most toxic source of oil mining in the world.
But that should come as no surprise. In 1994 Levant was in Washington D.C. for an internship funded by the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Progam. Charles Koch and his brother David own 84% of Koch Industries, an oil production conglomerate, and have pumped tens of millions of dollars into funding global warming denialism.
It’s thanks to the efforts of the Koch brothers that a lot of people think they can have an opinion on global warming (maybe yes, maybe no) — which is like having an opinion on gravity.